FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

That “Sell By This Date” Label Is an Unregulated Guesstimate

Fortunately there's a Facebook page where you can post pictures of your old yogurt.
Photo via Lars Plougmann/Flickr

It’s no secret that Americans waste a lot of food. We’ve been known to pitch at least forty percent— totaling $165 billion worth—of the food we produce. A new study from Harvard Law School and the Natural Resources Defense Council found that part of problem is that we listen to the dates posted on the food to tell us when we need to pitch it, but those dates aren't actually telling you when you shouldn't be eating something.

"Sell By" or "Best By" dates don’t really mean what people think they do. The labels aren’t an FDA requirement or anything, and they don’t really tell you when the food is going from edible to poisonous. It's not really about the consumer's safety.

Advertisement

“Manufacturers are doing a estimate of when they think the best quality will be, but they’re trying to be protective of their brands.” Emily Broad Leib, director of Harvard Law School’s Food and Policy Clinic, told CNN. “And they were really intended from the beginning to be about freshness not safety.”

So when Americans throw out something just because of the date on it—something that 9 out of 10 of Americans do, according to the study—we aren’t doing it for our own health or benefit. We’re making sure we never associate Nabisco with anything stale.

Labels dating food for consumers started popping up in the 1970s, with 10 state governments adopting legislation requiring them by 1973. American shoppers told surveyors at the time that they thought a uniform, clear label system was a good idea, and at least 10 federal bills were introduced from 1973 to 1975, but none passed. Legislation has popped up periodically since 1999, but it just never seems to make it.

The result is a patchwork of rules across the states. For example, New York does not require date labels to be applied to any products, while all six of its neighboring states—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island—do. Regardless of how you feel about government regulation, the system could obviously be streamlined and made easier for manufacturers with a little top-down leadership. As it stands we’re just wasting and wanting.

Advertisement

“These dates are not regulated and most people think they have meaning when in fact at the federal level the only food that has rules about date labels is infant formula,” said Leib. “Everything else is made up by states and companies. [The dates] are completely inconsistent.”

What’s more, food that is mishandled, like milk left unrefrigerated too long, can go bad long before its date says that it will. And “Sell By” dates are only relevant to products that aren’t opened, making them irrelevant once the seal is broken. Consumers are not only throwing away edible food, but we might be holding onto stuff that’s already gone bad.

So even though labels are a mess right now, consumers and retailers are already conditioned to look for them. The study suggests how the message can finally become worthy of the medium.

For starters, the “Sell By” date should be made invisible to consumers, since it really has never had anything to do with them. Instead there should be uniform, unambiguous labels, clearly delineated between safety-based dates and quality based ones. On non-perishable items, rather than a “Best Before” date, have a “Best Within XX days of opening.”

At the end of today, anyway, it seems like the sniff test and looking for mold are the best things you can do for yourself. If you have questions though, you can post a picture of a confusing label, or just some questionable food, to NRDC’s Facebook page, and they’ll weigh in on whether you should eat that or not. Ideally this step could be skipped in the future, but it’s nice to know that someone’s looking out for you.